We need diversity in our communities not just at the bottom level but in leadership to represent and advocate for our interests. White men are naturally incentivized to be all “I care about the technology, let’s not get political” because the status quo benefits them and the externalities disproportionately hurt us.
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@danirabbit So I'm going to preface this by outing myself as white GenX dude. About a decade ago I left my peckerwood good'ole boys-club hometown in Florida (one of the reddest) to move to Hawaii (one of the bluest).
The reasons were "complicated" but what it boiled down to was my wife's education being overskilled for the labor market there and my own training being under-used. So now I'm the minority in a melting pot pan-pacific community. I've experienced it on both sides of that privelage equation. Still wouldn't move back to the South.
The town I came from had a lot of "affluence" I'm talking $10,000,000 vacation houses on the beach where the owners show up for 3 months a year. Paid a lot of my way through the undergraduate years as a STEM tutor. A lot of it was genuinely rewarding work that made me deeply happy. But every now and then I'd snag a gig in one of those communities where status is measured in the number of gates one must pass through to gain entry. It's hard to properly articulate how it is to grow up among the kind of privelage these little people inherit.
Case in point. Had a pair of siblings boy and girl. Mom was an Israeli "author"/trophy-wife/money-launderer who deligated their education to me as a tutor with an online curriculum. The girl was fine, wanted to learn, was happy. The boy figured it out pretty quickly that it was all optional if he didn't want to. I'd try to move through the days lesson plans and he made it his goal to derail my attempts.
At a certain point in this game he had made I stopped the lessons and explained the importance of being knowledgeable, competent, diligent. He tuned me out. So I redirected the conversation. "What is it you want to do when you grow up?" I asked him.
"I'm going to be a tennis-instructor." he asserted.
"That's great, why do you want to be a tennis-instructor?" I asked.
"Because tennis is fun."
"It is" I affermed, "but being a professional at tennis still takes lots of work. And being liked and trusted by people enough to make it your job requires knowing things that have little to do with tennis."
Unphased he rolled his little shoulders and demured "Somthing else then."
And the thing is this. He had a trust fund before he took his first shit. The kid could do exactly as he pleased and be a fuc-boi all his life. This is how the people owning our economy think. This is how we got to where we are.
Me, still not getting it, related my days interactions back to the mother. Her response was to "redirect him" "I'm being paid to teach" (I was not, in fact. I was being paid to tutor.) and that she would handle discipline. There was none. His education in privelage was already that entrenched by 10.
The privelage of the uneducated bigoted white-asshole is a derivative form of the privelaged boys who inherit get bestowed with. It's not as bad as you think. It's worse, and the ones who own 99% of everything know it.
@danirabbit
Exactly! Ironically this pseudo moralistic stance is quite the *political move, long used to protect power and silence diverse opinions.
@danirabbit I have such bile for the idea of "apoliticism" and the things it carries water for out of cowardice. I used to care about the games industry and follow it, and that was a place where the pattern really was laid bare in what gamer culture complained about.
A protagonist can be a man, or political.
A protagonist can be white, or political.
A protagonist can be straight, or political.
A protagonist can be cis, or political.
A protagonist can fine with mass-murdering brown people in the name of American interests... or political.
And many of these still apply for non-protagonists. In fact, female characters usually aren't, but are held to their own standards of attractiveness, because anything that doesn't pander to cishet whiteboy gooning is _political._ It's always been a farce that the participants were too stupid to mask - and that brazenness has traditionally been the only thin, perforated line between Gamer Culture and how power works everywhere else.
@danirabbit and that by itself is a vulnerability, because it narrows your scope and lets you be blindsided by things you ‘never saw coming’. Diversity makes communities stronger and more resilient, it’s not some luxury.
